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Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Law of Unintended Consequences at Work

People who want to make health choices for you argue smoking bans are good for the health of business patrons. Smoking bans in privately owned places where the public congregates have pushed smokers out doors on to patios at bars and restaurants.

The do-gooders didn’t foresee that business owners would install outdoor space heaters to meet the needs of their smoking customers. However, the do-gooders never give up. Now it is the health of Mother Earth that motivates them to use government to ban outdoor heaters.

"Patio heaters are scandalous because they are burning fossil fuels in the open sky, so producing vast quantities of CO2 with very little heat benefit," said European parliamentarian Fiona Hall . . .

The article says, "According to UK government statistics, outdoor heaters produce about 22,200 tons of CO2 a year . . . " What are they concerned about? This amount for a whole year is small compared to the 51,000 tons of CO2 involved in Christmas dinner on one day for a mere one-third of Britons. Do-gooders will continue to meddle because they conceive of themselves as saviors of Mother Earth.

What’s next? I suggest they tackle forest fires which release vast quantities of CO2 with very little benefit from the heat.

2 comments:

The bandwagon of local smoking bans now steamrolling across the nation -from sea to sea- has nothing to do with protecting people from the supposedthreat of "second-hand" smoke.

Indeed, the bans themselves are symptoms of a far more grievous threat; acancer that has been spreading for decades and has now metastasizedthroughout the body politic, spreading even to the tiniest organs of localgovernment. This cancer is the only real hazard involved - the cancer ofunlimited government power.

The issue is not whether second-hand smoke is a real danger or a phantommenace, as a study published recently in the British Medical Journalindicates. The issue is: if it were harmful, what would be the properreaction? Should anti-tobacco activists satisfy themselves with educatingpeople about the potential danger and allowing them to maketheir own decisions, or should they seize the power of government and forcepeople to make the "right" decision?

Supporters of local tobacco bans have made their choice. Rather thanattempting to protect people from an unwanted intrusion on their health, thetobacco bans are the unwanted intrusion.

Loudly billed as measures that only affect "public places," they haveactually targeted private places: restaurants, bars, nightclubs, shops, andoffices - places whose owners are free to set anti-smoking rules or whosecustomers are free to go elsewhere if they don't like the smoke. Some localbans even harass smokers in places where their effect on others is obviouslynegligible, such as outdoor public parks.

The decision to smoke, or to avoid "second-hand" smoke, is a question to beanswered by each individual based on his own values and his own assessmentof the risks. This is the same kind of decision free people make regardingevery aspect of their lives: how much to spend or invest, whom to befriendor sleep with, whether to go to college or get a job, whether to get marriedor divorced, and so on.

All of these decisions involve risks; some have demonstrably harmfulconsequences; most are controversial and invite disapproval from theneighbours. But the individual must be free to make these decisions. He mustbe free, because his life belongs to him, not to his neighbours, and onlyhisown judgment can guide him through it.

Yet when it comes to smoking, this freedom is under attack. Cigarettesmokers are a numerical minority, practicing a habit considered annoying andunpleasant to the majority. So the majority has simply commandeered thepower of government and used it to dictate their behaviour.

That is why these bans are far more threatening than the prospect ofinhaling a few stray whiffs of tobacco while waiting for a table at yourfavourite restaurant. The anti-tobacco crusaders point in exaggerated alarmat those wisps of smoke while they unleash the systematic and unlimitedintrusion of government into our lives.

Thanks for stopping by and leaving thoughtful comments. You are correct: the health of people is not the issue. Control of the people is the issue.

The health of the earth is also not the issue. It is control of the masses that government at all levels is determined to master.

Smoking should be an individual's freedom that is exercised with respect to others, just as countless other freedoms.

Elected, appointed and hired government officials know they can take away these freedoms because the masses have been silent when special interest groups have demanded government solve the perceived problems that the special interest groups could never solve on their own.